I’m sure I must've misunderstood you, professor. Dementors are, after all, under the control of Ministry of Magic. And it's so silly of me, but it sounded for a moment as though, you were suggesting that the Ministry had ordered the attack on this boy.

That would be disturbing indeed, Madam Under-Secretary, which is why I'm sure the Ministry will be mounting a full scale enquiry...into why the two Dementors were so very far from Azkaban...and why they attack without the authorization? Of course there is someone who might be behind the attack. Cornelius, I implore you to see the reason. The evidence the Dark Lord have returned is incontrovertible.

He's not back!

Review

by Julie Rigg

The most original creation in Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix is Imelda Staunton as Dolores Umbridge, the incurably smug bureaucrat turned inquisitor inflicted on the Hogwarts school by the Ministry of Magic.

Perennially smiling, clad in pink boucle and pink angora with pussycat bows, Dolores does indeed wield the iron claw inside the velvet gloves. Her smile is as tight as her perm; and those little blue Miss Tiggy-Winkle eyes, twinkling as she comes out with yet another line in refined sadism, is enough to make any fourteen-year-old sign up for the revolution. It's a delicious performance, and it's enhanced by her wardrobe, one of the more frightening apparitions in the film.

Indeed the art department, wardrobe and production design have risen as one to the challenge of conveying Dolores Umbridge's awful ambience: the parade of pink suiting is rivalled only by an entire wall of plastic-framed kitten art...all of it wriggling.

Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix is a brisk, competent edition of the Harry Potter series which upholds the standards of the earlier films. There has been some blithering on from reviewers about how dark and angst-ridden this film is, but it's no darker than the last two, I think. Yes, Harry does seem to spend a lot of time brooding and sulking in his room, par for the course for teenagers, and strangely enough this didn't seem to bother the younger children whose parents had brought them to the screening I attended.

But if I had to characterise this film in the series, I would call it the 'solidarity' edition. 'Harry, you are not in this alone,' Hermione and Fred re-assure him as he surfaces from time to time with a finely honed sense of grievance. Well, the Dark Lord has been picking on him, and the headmaster doesn't believe him, and...well maybe he has a point.

So he and his chums form a little revolutionary cell, 'Dumbledore's Army', they call themselves, and hole up practising defensive magic. United they will stand, while the Ministry of Magic turns fascist.

Those who have read the 900-odd pages of Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix will know all this, and more. The film-makers have done an excellent job adapting one of the more sprawling Harry Potter novels into a film which moves briskly towards its...I was going to say anticlimax, but that's not fair...towards the reprieve the three chums, and ourselves, receive before the final battles.

But this fifth film does raise another morass Harry, Ron and Hermione must confront. They are ageing.

Child actors age fast. That's why Stanley Kubrick passed the screenplay he had developed for the film AI on to Steven Spielberg. Kubrick knew he couldn't work fast enough to shoot it.

If Harry, Ron and Hermione are supposed to be fourteen in this film, well, they don't look it. They look like the seventeen- to eighteen-year-olds they are. Two of them are obviously shaving, and Hermoine has long ago filled out her tank top. By the time the final film is released three years hence they are going to look very odd indeed in their Hogwarts uniforms.

None of this seemed to worry the six- to nine-year-olds around me at the screening I attended. But then, they grow up so fast these days. The toddlers putting their heads together in the foyer were probably planning their gap years.

Notes:

turned: an actor turned politician/a housewife turned author etc; someone who has done one job and then does sth completely different;

Mrs Tiggy-Winkle:The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle is a book written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter . It was first published in 1905 . 

    ” A little girl loses her handkerchiefs and goes on a search for them. She sees some white cloths on the grass high up a hill and climbs up to discover a little hedgehog washerwoman, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, with her handkerchiefs freshly laundered, along with many other interesting articles such as stockings for a hen.”

yet: used to emphasize that sth is even more than it was before or is in addition to what existed before; yet more/bigger/higher etc; yet another reason to be cautious;

parade: parade of wealth, knowledge etc, (often disapproving) an obvious display of sth, particularly in order to impress other people;

blithering: talking incoherently; as, a blithering idiot;

be par for the course: to be what you normally expect to happen; =typical;

pick on: BrE, to choose a particular person or thing;

hole up: to hide somewhere for a period of time;

fill out: if you fill out, or your body fills out, you become slightly fatter;

tank top: BrE, a piece of clothing like a sweater, but with no sleeves;

a gap year: BrE, a year between school and university when some students earn money, travel, etc;


Director : David Yates
Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Harry Melling, Jason Boyd, Richard Macklin, Kathryn Hunter, Miles Jupp, Fiona Shaw, Richard Griffiths, Adrian Rawlins, Geraldine Somerville, Robert Pattinson, Ralph Fiennes
Producer: David Barron, David Heyman
Script: Michael Goldenberg (screenplay), J.K. Rowling (novel)
Cinematographer: Slawomir Idziak
Music: Nicholas Hooper
Running time: 138
Classification: PG

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows --The last of the Harry Potter series